Dr Iqbal Survé

Founder, The Sekunjalo Group

Dr Survé is a Physician, Entrepreneur and an ardent Philanthropist, born and educated in Cape Town, South Africa. He was affectionately known as the “Struggle Doctor” because of his provision of medical care towards victims of apartheid brutality including some of those imprisoned on the infamous Robben Island. Dr Survé had both a personal and/or a professional relationship with many former Island prisoners including Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Andrew Mlangeni and Govan Mbeki on their release from Robben Island.
President Nelson Mandela in 1997 made an impassioned plea for black professionals to enter the mainstream economy of South Africa to bring about meaningful transformation of the social and economic landscape in order to redress the economic legacy of apartheid. This resulted in Dr. Survé leaving his first love medicine, and founding The Sekunjalo Group, which is today wholly owned by the Survé family.

As an Entrepreneur, emerging from very humble beginnings, Dr Survé founded one of Africa’s most successful investment holding groups, The Sekunjalo Group (www.sekunjalo.com). He serves as Executive Chairman of The Sekunjalo Group, with its headquarters in Cape Town. The Group has more than 200 investments across the African continent, with an intrinsic market value exceeding $10 billion (USD). Sekunjalo is the shareholding/equity partner to a number of multinationals on the African continent including Siemens, Nokia, Saab, BT, and Coriant among others and Dr Survé serves as Chairman or Deputy- Chairman of many of these companies’ boards.
Sekunjalo is a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Dr Survé is a regular contributor and participant in the Davos and Summer Davos meetings. Sekunjalo is recognized by WEF as one of the worlds’ fastest growing companies aka The New Champions/Forum Advisory member.
Sekunjalo’s investment portfolio includes Oil and Gas, Food, Fishing, Aquaculture, Power, Resources, Transport and Mobility, Telecoms, Civil Security and Defence, Media, Technology, Bio-technology, Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals and Asset Management. Sekunjalo pioneers many social impact investment initiatives in SubSaharan Africa. The Group and its investment partners together employ more than 115 000 people on the African continent. The Group is purpose driven to positively impact on the lives of its stakeholders on the African continent.

Survé Philanthropies (SP), the philanthropic foundation of Dr Survé and the Survé family, has 7 separate Foundations supporting children’s, women’s and human rights, education, music, arts and culture, entrepreneurship, social impact investing, climate change and healthcare. The Sekunjalo Group distributes 90% of its annual dividends to the Survé Philanthropic Foundations (SP), with the aim of impacting positively on the future of the people of Africa. Sekunjalo recently launched a R500 million social impact fund.

The story of Africa’s rising is an important narrative that The Survé family and Sekunjalo have committed to by investing in media on the African continent. In South Africa, Sekunjalo has recently invested significantly in the tech- media sector on the African continent. Dr Survé is the chairman of one of Africa’s largest print and online media groups, Independent Media, (www.independentmedia.co.za) which has 24 major newspaper titles with 10 million readers daily, including the only pan African newspaper, The African Independent (www.africanindy.com). In 2015, Sekunjalo founded Africa’s first global news, text, picture, video content syndication service, the African News Agency (ANA) (www.africannewsagency.com) which currently distributes African content across the world and reaches in excess of a billion viewers/readers daily with its platforms. Two year after launching, ANA successfully placed 15% of its shares with global partners at a valuation of $1,6 billion. Sekunjalo as part of its tech-media investments portfolio has acquired a majority shareholding in one of Africa’s largest and fastest growing e commerce companies, Loot (Loot.co.za).